Las Vegas Is A Dum City

From the Las Vegas Sun: That’s according to some number crunching by The Daily Beast Web site, which in its ranking of smarts for 55 metro areas put Las Vegas one notch away from being the dumbest city in America. The only place dumber, The Daily Beast said, is Fresno, Calif.
The online magazine kept its assessment of Las Vegas short: "A city that prides itself on sin performs predictably for each of our intellectual-based criteria."
To determine the criteria, the Daily Beast used these figures: For education, it at looked how many residents had bachelor’s and graduate degrees. For intellectual environment, the magazine looked at three components: data on the sales of nonfiction books; the ratio of higher education institutions to population; and the number of eligible voters who cast ballots in the presidential election. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/oct/05/report-vegas-near-bottom-list-smartest-cities/
My former hometown, Milwaukee is ranked 15th.
Using the web site criteria, I can see where Las Vegas gets the ranking. We have only 1 major university (UNLV) and it isn't that great, unless you count basketball as a major.
Book reading in Vegas? Well, we don't read a lot of books, granted, unless you count the books on gambling and reading to try and get advantage at the casino. Yeah, that's a stereotype. But the reality is that we don't have a bookstore on every corner, but in the days of the Internet, who cares.
But to say we are dumb, is at best, stupid.
Many people in Vegas do have a degree, but in Vegas, you don't need a college degree to make money. Some casino card dealers make over $100,000. Firefighters can make well over $100,000 a year and you don't need a 4 year degree, all you need is to work a lot of overtime. Same with cops.
We are a tourist community and we make money money off the tourists who come from the smartest areas of the country. How many people come to Vegas from Raleigh-Durham in hopes to win a lot of money? At least a plane full or 2 a day. Who's smarter now?